Day by Night Read online

  Haphazard nervousness changed to horror in Vel Thaidis.

  Then the voice came, and her skin stiffened and her hair crawled under its jeweled combs.

  “Vel Thaidis Yune Hirz your pardon that we roused you from your Maram but it is Jate and we assumed you would be prepared for us seeing you have been the perpetrator of an injury.”

  She filled her lungs as the Lawguards had no need to do.

  “I was ready yesterjate. No summons came.”

  “Again your pardon some hours are permitted the princely houses in such a case that they may prepare a suitable defense.”

  “I have no defense, except my innocence.”

  “Vel Thaidis Yune Hirz will you please listen for the chime which indicates our receivers are tuned to impress your voice and you will then recount to us your version of the wounding of Ceedres Yune Thar leaving out nothing that may assist us or yourself.”

  “Before that, will you tell me if you’ve taken a statement from Ceedres Yune Thar?”

  “We have done so.”

  “And from others?”

  “Certain others.”

  “My brother—” she said, but her heart almost choked her.

  “Velday Yune Hirz has offered no statement. Procedurally he would be disqualified as biased and now please listen for the chime.”

  “One other thing,” she said. “Tell me if you have questioned the auto-priest at the Thar-boundary temple?”

  “All persons and mechanisms whose presence was approximate to the wounding of Ceedres Yune Thar have been questioned and now please listen for the chime.”

  She lifted her eyes for relief, to gaze beyond them.

  She tried to draw comfort from the fact that the priest must have revealed to them her conversation with Ceedres in the black and fiery room of the temple, the occult room where he had asked her to become his wife and she had refused him. Whatever act he had implicated her in, the testimony of the auto-priest must show that she had no cause to harm Ceedres, only the inclination to avoid him. That he was desperate, not she, for restitution of honor and wealth.

  Somehow, no comfort came to her. Her agitation increased and she could not smother it, though it was important that she should. Not only that she might render a coherent account, but that her patterns should be readable. Absolute detection of human lie or truth was not possible to the machines of the Yunea, the human faculties being too complex and the mind too random in its process. Nevertheless, some conclusions could be drawn, which would bolster, or prejudice, the subject’s case. Yet the more crowded by fear the patterns were, the less open to analysis. Indeed, fear itself was weighed against the subject. In a world where Law was dispassionate and judgment rarely in error, the guiltless had scant need to be afraid. You came to the machine blameless and therefore calm. The electronic brain, perfect in its logic, absolved you. But if you came uneasily it was because you prophesied your crime’s discovery by that same perfect logic. Fear was damning. And Vel Thaidis was afraid. So, when the chime sounded, she said at once, “First let me admit to being afraid. Not because of guilt or because I doubt the ability of Yunean Law, but because I utterly mistrust Ceedres Yune Thar himself. I suspect he has indicated me under a pretense that it will be hard for me to tear aside. I don’t know how he has done this, but I’m apprehensive of it. That said, I place myself at the mercy of the Law.”

  Her voice unsteady, here and there faltering altogether, her hands clenched, she gave her story. As she did so, her eyes were nailed to the colored window tracery reflected on the wall above the Lawguards. She spoke of Ceedres, the temple, the upper room like a mythological hell, the marriage proposal, the denial, the knife he had used to stab himself with her hand locked under his against the hilt. And all the time, she saw the crimson, gold and mauve light-ghosts of the flowers on the white plastum. Somehow she understood her words entered the recording device of the machines, and adhered there as the reflections adhered: colored, visible—but still ghosts. Why look at the flowers on the wall? For the truth, look at the original picture painted on the window. Ceedres’ painting of the truth. She did not doubt he could lie far more convincingly than she could present her words in frightened honesty.

  Her heart stammered, and the Lawguards registered its stammering.

  His heart would be stone and steel.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Vel Thaidis, your brother is coming,” the blond robot attendant said.

  The sentence struck her, its familiarity. How often this must have been said to her. Your brother is coming. Coming back from J’ara, from hunting, from a dinner at the Yune Chures, the Onds, the Domms. . . .

  How often she had inquired: “You are certain that it’s Velday?” And his patterns—those fascinating fingerprints of the human life-force, unique in each—had been checked in order to reassure her. A superfluity, for robots were seldom optically mistaken, even at great distances. Her demand for certainty, then, must be yet another part of her insecurity, her dread of losing Velday. Already lost.

  She did not ask for the check of patterns now.

  She watched the jade platter of the lake, veined with white gold by the sun.

  The Lawguards, having recorded her recital of events, had departed four hours ago. It was now the thirteenth hour of Jate. The palace of Hirz stood directionally at hespa-Ule. Vel Thaidis’ spirit stood at the gate of chaos.

  The Lawguards had not threatened her, nor indeed informed her of anything, except that soon a second summons would be accorded her. They left in her keeping a darkened title which would come alight at the chosen instant to reveal this summons to her. She did not know when. She did not know what Ceedres had told the machines. She did not know anything. Save that chaos was before her. Only that. Now she would bear the dark title with her everywhere, like a vile toy, touching it, examining it, rigid for the moment of communication.

  Velday had ridden on one of the bronze beasts, across the pale sand from the hesten area into which the estate of Thar was moving, and in which Chure and Ond lands already lay. He had returned from Ond, she deduced, where Ceedres had been taken, the convalescent guest of Naine and Omevia.

  Velday was some way up the slope, but he had halted the beast, and sat there, looking down at her. She saw them, the robot mount and the young man, gauzily redrawn on the fluid of the lake. She did not turn.

  Suddenly he shouted to her. “Ceedres is alive!”

  It startled her that he should shout that. Of course Ceedres would live. It had been her hysteria to think him dead even for a second.

  She did not turn.

  Velday smote the button panel of the bronze beast angrily, and galloped away along the slope.

  * * *

  • • •

  At the sixteenth hour, the last hour of Jate, the dark tile of the Lawguards glowed and whispered in Vel Thaidis’ hand.

  “Vel Thaidis Yune Hirz, from the collective evidence of yourself and others, and from the reading of your patterns and those of others,” the tile paused. It whispered. It softly said, “By the Law, you have been found culpable. But, finding you guilty of a murderous act, the Law does not sentence you. Your peers will do that. A council is to be convened at the seventh hour of the following Jate. You must open your house to this council and present yourself before it in fitting manner. Do you have anything to say?”

  “Ceedres,” she said. Abruptly all inhibition deserted her. “Ceedres lied!” she shrieked. “Whatever he has said, he lied!” It was virtually what she had cried out at Velday by the temple. And she flung the tile from her. Astonishingly, it smashed to pieces against one of the columns of her apartment. Perhaps it had been designed to break. Perhaps all those who were found guilty in this way had flung their tiles from them, and the final mercy of the Law was that the tile should shatter, a sop to their frustration and their terror.

  Part Tw
o

  Vitra Klovez was startled; her eyes had flooded with sympathetic tears. She blinked her silver lids, and the tears spilled. She glanced at the screen, but naturally, the stupefied workers on their cushioned platform were not weeping at all, and now the screen faded into blankness.

  The rabble were incapable of finer feelings. Or their finer feelings had been sandpapered from them by the rottenness and hardship of their lives. They would find it fruitless to weep for themselves; why spare tears for another? Yet they had been enthralled. Glimpsing the screen now and then during this long Jate’s Fabulism, Vitra had thought she detected a certain avidity shining behind their mesmerized masks.

  The machines which relayed Vitra’s fantasy through onto the screens in the Subterior recreation centers, and thence into the part-hypnotized brains of the watchers, were now quieting in the dome chamber. Above, space kept up its pitiless stare. Some Fabulasts were intimidated by this stare, and would press a switch to mist over the transparent vanes of a dome. (Recalling the Thar temple’s upper room, Vitra frowned with pleasure—that had been a brilliant touch, a marvelous joke—though quite where it was meant to lead her characters she was largely unsure.)

  As she rose, she was still indignantly sorry the worms had not wept, for Vel Thaidis’ story was very moving. The screen revealed selected areas of the watching platforms in all the centers, merging them into a whole in the Fabulast’s screen. Later, other shifts might climb onto the watching platforms and replay for themselves the pre-recorded dream. Vitra had a sudden urge, alien to her, to return in an hour or so to Rise Iu, activate the screen and observe how other sections of the rabble received her story—but, no. That was foolish, and most unsophisticated. To care what reaction her genius had evoked! In any case, she guessed the truth of the matter. The worms thrilled to see the destruction and fall of an aristocrat, even in a make-believe country on the uninhabitable desert of the planet’s solar side.

  Of course, Vel Thaidis must fall, a panacea to their viciousness and jealousy. Princely tragedy was not an unusual theme for Fabulasts to tackle. Yet Vitra wondered if any others had dared probe so near the sore spot of envy as she.

  “How daring of you, Vitra,” she mused, half self-mockingly and aloud, product of many hours alone.

  Vyen had not come to meet her. He had lost interest already in her vocation, and was most probably still at Olvia’s scented palace in the Residencia’s Eres sector.

  As for Casrus . . . curiously, she had almost forgotten Casrus. Having transformed him into the villainous and electric Ceedres, and in control of him therefore, making him perform all the acts her fantasy suggested, his counterpart had lost importance. Until she remembered him. Sharp as acid, then, the memory of her anger and her failure, making her wince. Ceedres was her toy. As inspiration poured invigoratingly through her, he obeyed her implicitly. But Casrus—she had never, in real life, been able to handle him.

  She supposed he was yet toiling in the Nentta mine, working with his robots and machines and with the awful Subterines themselves to unblock the collapsed tunnel. Then he would tend the hurt. Then he would go home to Temal, the worker-murderess, whose hair was the soft ashy black of cinders, and whose feet were shod in gold and platinum. Damn Temal. And damn Casrus. Vyen also, who had not come to meet her.

  But she had no need to be alone. Many would be glad of and delighted by her company. She would choose companions.

  A great weariness overcame her as she emerged onto the Iu terrace above the city, and beheld the chariot car waiting on its pneumatic runners. To create dreams, though exhilarating at the time, took its toll. Other Fabulasts had not seemed to experience this enervation, but then, they were not so creative, so artistic as she. Her talent had drained her. If she meant to keep J’ara again this Maram, she must first go home to Klovez and sleep an hour or so.

  (She thought of Casrus in Olvia’s salon, come straight from labor in the freezing, poisonous intestine of a mine—yet apparently untired, alert for more. Damn Casrus.)

  The chariot car started off with a jolt that matched Vitra’s snappish mood. She stabbed at the button panel and the car swirled to the left at the bottom of spiraling Iu road. The Klovez palace lay in Uta sector—or sector thirty-one. The geographical directions of the inverted Yunea were circular and transitory, but the underground cold-side world had no directions at all, and told its areas purely by number.

  As the car sped between glacial heights and toppling grottoes, Vitra opened her chronometer. It was midway through the fourteenth hour.

  Presently, the chariot passed under Rise Uta. Uta’s crowning complex was of air-making devices, which emitted delicate irregular pulses of frosty light. Sometimes, by Maram, these lit the ceiling of Vitra’s sleeping chamber. As a child, her parents long dead in their three-hundredth years (shades of Vel Thaidis), she had occasionally turned off her robot guardian and climbed to high windows to watch Uta’s mild glows strike the rock-sky of the Subplanetary city, attempting to predict when each would come. When she was thirteen, she had seen Casrus Klarn racing a flimsy steel chariot at Uta’s exercise arena in the shadow of the Rise. Vyen was learning to fence there with the fire-sword, and detesting it. Foppish even at twelve, he preferred to make bystanders laugh rather than himself learn anything. Vitra and Vyen had been the pets of the Residencia, then. Both so alike, such serpentinely pretty and quick-witted adolescents, their slim feline feet already on the path to manhood, womanhood. But Casrus, a remote and impressive seventeen, had never approached.

  Fantastic in the intensifier lamps, the palace of Klovez stood on its hill of rock. Pale green fungyra trees, the only sort which the cold-siders had ever persuaded to grow outside a tank, leaned against the crystalline walls, webbing them with the white tongues of their leaves. In the rounded hump of the roof, a single window, shaped like a flying bird and set with leaded blue glass, burned a shrill light. It was the unmistakable outer window of Vyen’s apartment, bird-formed to amuse him, for birds did not fly here, save in sculptures, books or ancient screened pictures of other actual or invented places. (Why had she not thought to add birds to the scenery of the Yunea? Perhaps she might.)

  Vitra dismounted from the car, which took itself off. She spoke to the door, which opened. A single robot appeared in the shadowy, unilluminated foyer. Unlike the sun-side robots, this machine was simply a box on noiseless wheels, equipped with a myriad dexterous devices that could be extended or retracted as necessary. In height it was a mere three feet. Beetles and such-like Klovez left to its neighbors.

  Vitra brushed her fingers over a panel, but the foyer remained in darkness.

  “Robot,” said Vitra, “why is there no light?”

  The robot sizzled and spoke to her in a dry metallic voice.

  “Your brother wishes you.”

  “Answer my question.”

  “Your brother wishes you.”

  “Stupid thing,” said Vitra. The instruction Vyen had left it seemed to be overriding all other demands. Possibly the absence of light was connected to some new sinister game of Vyen’s. Faintly intrigued by the fancy, Vitra ceased scolding the robot, and entered the lift.

  She rose three floors, then stepped out in a corridor above and hesitated. The robot had not accompanied her and she could not see her way. Windowless and unlit, the space was pitch black, nor did any of the spontaneous lamps activate at her arrival.

  “Vyen!” she shouted.

  At once an aperture gaped along the passage, and the electric blue glow of his apartment ran out over the corridor.

  As Vitra entered the big room, her eyes went cursorily over Vyen’s individual decor. Weird lizard-like forms (again modeled from the memory banks of machines rather than true life) gamboled grotesquely but statically in the transparent floor. A figure of ice-green glass danced slowly on a pedestal, waving its arms. Vyen sat in a black chair, among a litter of books, before the bird window, his hands eng
aged with two or three fiddle-toys of plastivory and silver. His white face, turquoise in the room’s eerie glow, was infuriatingly obtuse.

  “What are you playing at?” Vitra demanded with loving dislike, “I supposed you were with Olvia.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “So I see. What have you done to the lamps of the house, oh most horrid little brother?”

  “I,” said Vyen gently, “have done nothing. I thought it was your notion.”

  “What? Why should I do such a thing?”

  “To reward me for my sojourn at Klastu. You hoped I’d break an ankle in the dark and be confined to the house.”

  “Then why should I stumble about in the dark myself?”

  “I don’t know,” said Vyen. “Why should you?”

  Vitra took from the silver chain, which passed as a girdle, an alcohol stick, and bit off a piece of it nervously.

  “Can it be,” she said, “the lamps of house Klovez have failed?”

  Her eyes became gradually very large, and she sank down on the book-scattered cushions opposite Vyen’s chair.

  “What’s the matter?” Vyen inquired. “It’s easily remedied.” He pressed a knob on the arm of the chair. A panel in the blank wall swung open, and one of the boxes on wheels rolled out. “Go and see to the lights,” said Vyen.

  “What is amiss with the lights?” asked the machine.

  “They are out.”

  The robot rambled across the floor and into the corridor.

  “Have you,” said Vitra, “ever heard of the lamps of a house failing?”

  “I’m sure,” said Vyen, “if anyone told me such a thing, I’d be far too bored to listen. Therefore, no.”

  Vitra threw the empty holder of her stick upon the floor, and put her palms to her cheeks. Vyen observed her with relaxed surprise. Only his eyes, enlarged and dark as her own, gave him away. The lamps of the princely palaces of the Residencia never failed, even for an hour, even for an instant. The event was ominous by nature of its uniqueness, if for nothing else.